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Dickens and Society
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Dickens: A Christmas Carol
In this course, Dr Christopher Pittard (University of Portsmouth) explores Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella, ‘A Christmas Carol’. In the first module, we think about the background to ‘A Christmas Carol’, the circumstances that led Dickens to write it, and the political issues to which Dickens is responding. In the second module, we provide a close reading of the opening two paragraphs of the novel, before turning in the third module to think about the genre of the ghost story. In the fourth module, we think about the politics of A Christmas Carol, before turning in the fifth module to think about the interplay between the text of ‘A Christmas Carol’ and the illustrations by John Leech that accompanied the 1843 first edition of the novel. In the sixth, seventh and eight module, we provide close readings of three short sections of the novels – one for each of the spirits of Christmas – before turning in the ninth and final module to think about how the novel ends.
Dickens and Society
In this module, we think about the background to A Christmas Carol, the circumstances that led Dickens to write it, and the political issues to which Dickens is responding, focusing in particular on: (i) the status of A Christmas Carol as one of the only novels in the English language where seemingly everyone knows the story, and the reason why the novel has proved so singularly successful in entering the public consciousness; (ii) how views on the central interest of the novel have changed from its first publication in December 1843 to the present day; (iii) the importance of ‘A Christmas Carol’ in Dickens’ career, particularly in relation to his previous novel, ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’ (serialised between 1842-44); (iv) Dickens’ engagement with Christmas stories prior to ‘A Christmas Carol’, including in ‘Sketches by Boz’ (appeared in newspapers and periodicals between 1833-36) and ‘The Pickwick Papers’ (serialised between 1836-37); (v) the ways in which the idea of Christmas had changed between the late 18th and mid-19th century, and Dickens’ contribution to that transformation; (vi) child hunger and poverty in 1840s England, and the extent to which Dickens was aware of the problem and wanted to do something about it; and (vii) the idea of Dickens’ novels as texts to be performed to an audience rather than read alone, and the extent to which Dickens’ himself encouraged people to engage in his novels in this way.
Hello, I'm Dr Christopher Pittard.
00:00:05I'm senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Portsmouth,
00:00:08and this is a series of lectures on Charles Dickens is a Christmas Carol.
00:00:13And in his first lecture, I want to think about some of the background to this text,
00:00:19the circumstances that led Dickens to write it
00:00:25and the political situation to which he's responding.
00:00:28The Christmas Carol is an unusual text.
00:00:32It's possibly a unique text in the history of English literature,
00:00:35inasmuch as it's a text where seemingly everybody,
00:00:38simply the majority of the population,
00:00:43know the plot and seemed to know this text and seemed
00:00:45to notice novella even if they've never actually read it.
00:00:48Of course,
00:00:52other text seven novels have memorable scenes scenes
00:00:52that work themselves into the cultural imagination,
00:00:55and Dickens is especially good at this.
00:00:58So we might think of that scene in Oliver Twist with Oliver asking for more.
00:00:59But not many people know the whole plot of Oliver Twist in
00:01:03the same way that they know the plot of a Christmas Carol.
00:01:06It's the only novel in English literature that we all seem to
00:01:10be carrying around Withers as part of a fully formed narrative.
00:01:12A part of the reason for this is, of course, the fact.
00:01:17There's been adapted so many times the theatre and television,
00:01:19and I want to talk a little bit about why that might be a bit later,
00:01:21but also what makes this text so memorable.
00:01:26What makes it so easily grasp all in the mind is it has a very ordered structure to it.
00:01:29It set into five stages.
00:01:33It has the, uh, preliminary introduction setting up the characters Scrooge.
00:01:35His relationship with Molly and setting up the Mali is the first ghost.
00:01:40We then have the three ghosts, ghosts of Christmas, Past,
00:01:44Christmas Present and Christmas yet to come.
00:01:48It has a very familiar temporal order, and then the fifth stage fifth Stave,
00:01:50which wraps everything
00:01:55up. So actually, the very clear structure
00:01:56of this text makes it easily embedded into our cultural consciousness.
00:01:58But as a critic, Paul Davis has pointed out,
00:02:05there's also a flexibility about the Christmas Carol, to the extent that actually,
00:02:08different audiences have read it in very different ways
00:02:11later.
00:02:15Victorian readings of the novel, for instance,
00:02:16have focused more on the Cratchit family.
00:02:18It's become much more of a Victorian readers,
00:02:20it's become much more of an examination of the
00:02:23morality of the domestic family centred on the crotch.
00:02:25It's likewise adaptations into the 20th century into the
00:02:2819 seventies and 19 eighties have been much more
00:02:31concerned with the economics of the novel with how
00:02:34it relates to monetary policy in the 19 eighties.
00:02:38Likewise, in the 20th century has also been much more of a focus on Scrooge.
00:02:42It seems odd to think that Scrooge may not be the focus of this text, but indeed,
00:02:46as I said, Victorian readers are much more interested in the crotch.
00:02:49It's it's in the 20th century that we've become much more interested in a more
00:02:52sort of psychoanalytic meeting of Scrooge and
00:02:56the focus on his journey of redemption.
00:02:58So it's a text that is readable, is infinitely re readable,
00:03:02is open to all of these competing and sometimes conflicting interpretations.
00:03:06It's nowhere near, I think, as unsubtle as its critics maybe make it out to be
00:03:12in terms of its history.
00:03:18Dickens published a Christmas Carol on 19th of December 18 43.
00:03:19After rather intensive period of writing in November of that year,
00:03:24it's actually quite a rapidly formulated text.
00:03:29In many ways, the writing of this story was something of a release for him.
00:03:32Dickens previous novel Martin Chuzzlewit was a
00:03:36much darker and much more sombre text,
00:03:39but Martin Chuzzlewit as a novel was not doing especially well.
00:03:42Um, sales were down. The critical reception was mixed.
00:03:46And actually,
00:03:49Dickens publishers Chapman and Hall were
00:03:50threatening a reduction in payments reduction
00:03:52in the monetary income from the novel.
00:03:55And likewise, this.
00:03:58Martin Chuzzlewit was a novel that was
00:03:59causing controversy for its rather unflattering depiction
00:04:01of America because Dickens was someone who
00:04:04would eventually break the American market.
00:04:06But maybe not with Martin Chuzzlewit.
00:04:08So Dickens needed them to work on something else.
00:04:11He needed a release from this rather gloomy period
00:04:13of his career that he got himself into,
00:04:17and he hit on the idea of a Christmas story of a Christmas novel, almost in effect,
00:04:20creating a new genre.
00:04:25Now Dickens had actually written on Christmas Before Christmas.
00:04:27Carol doesn't appear out of nowhere in Dickens's work. Actually, he'd written in
00:04:31his first book, Sketches by Boz, which is a series of articles and short stories.
00:04:36Dickens had written a short sketch titled Christmas dinner
00:04:41in his first novel, Proper. The Pickwick Papers.
00:04:46Dickens that included a chapter which depicts a rural Christmas scene.
00:04:48And Dickens often have failed to be responsible for creating the modern Christmas.
00:04:53You may have heard of the film a couple of years ago.
00:04:57Now Dickens, the man who invented Christmas.
00:04:58That claim is slightly overstated.
00:05:02The claim that Dickens created modern Christmas
00:05:04is one that gets frequently repeated.
00:05:06But it is one that I don't think bears particularly close scrutiny.
00:05:08Although many of our images of Christmas do indeed come
00:05:12from Dickens do indeed come from the Victorian period.
00:05:15But Dickens himself was inheriting many of those images in A Christmas Carol.
00:05:19It's not the fact that Dickens creates this festival single handedly,
00:05:23but I do think that where Christmas Carol
00:05:28is significant is that consolidates the idea of
00:05:30a particularly urban Christmas of a Christmas in
00:05:33the city of the Christmas within a town,
00:05:36Uh, the Pickwick Papers have been focused on a rural Christmas,
00:05:38have been focused on Christmas as a kind of a rural festival and escape to the country
00:05:41before the Industrial revolution.
00:05:47Then, which was completed by the 18 thirties, 18 forties and into the 18 fifties,
00:05:48Christmas had been associated with the rural and even more feudal way of life.
00:05:53And we see this in The Pickwick Papers.
00:05:58Certainly we also see it still in modern advertising with the
00:06:00idea of the perfect Christmas retreat to the big country house.
00:06:03Now, by 18 43 of course, the industrial Revolution was largely over.
00:06:07But there was nonetheless concerns about this,
00:06:11for the English way of life and the fact that we had moved
00:06:14by the 18 forties from the agrarian economy to an industrial economy.
00:06:17Because the census of 18 51 slightly later shows
00:06:21that for the first time in British history,
00:06:25more people are living in towns and cities that are living in the countryside.
00:06:26So there's concern over what would it do to British ways of life, to culture,
00:06:31to society?
00:06:35What will it do to Christmas? Well, Christmas survive the Industrial revolution
00:06:36and what Dickens contribution in the Christmas
00:06:41Carol is to conclusively demonstrate that yes,
00:06:43it can.
00:06:46Christmas can become an urban festival,
00:06:47but its novella is also a reaction to
00:06:52contemporary political and social events as well.
00:06:55The 18 forties would, of course,
00:06:58come to be known as the Hungry 40 is a period of great privation, a great deprivation.
00:07:00This is also the age of the Irish famine,
00:07:05but it's also discussion about the treatment of Children and the poor in Britain
00:07:08as well.
00:07:14The starvation of the poor was a regular topic in the letters pages of The Times.
00:07:15To the extent in 18 46 they have to
00:07:19apologise for featuring this topic quite so regularly.
00:07:21The condition of Children in particular,
00:07:25prompted a parliamentary report on child poverty issued
00:07:27in 18 43 and Dickens reads the support.
00:07:30And this is in many ways one of the sparks that
00:07:33would lead him to write the Christmas Carol other forensically.
00:07:36In November of that year,
00:07:39Dickens wanted to write something quote on behalf of the poor man's child, unquote,
00:07:42in reaction to the parliamentary report.
00:07:48Likewise, on the 16th of September 18 43 Dickens wrote a letter to his friend,
00:07:52the philanthropist Angela Burdett Coots,
00:07:57talking about his visit to a local ragged school of school for the poor,
00:07:59and Dickens wrote of the condition of the Children he'd seen there.
00:08:03He wrote to Byrd and Coats in his letter
00:08:07that I have very seldom seen in order strange
00:08:09and dreadful things I've seen in London and elsewhere,
00:08:12anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited
00:08:15in these Children.
00:08:20And, of course, we will see again the images of those Children,
00:08:21the dire neglect of soul and body be incarnated
00:08:25in Christmas camel as the figures of ignorance and want
00:08:28Christmas. Carol also forms a turning point in Dickens's career itself.
00:08:33In the late 18 fifties,
00:08:38Dickens turns to more lucrative career as a public reader of his own works,
00:08:39public performer, reading extracts or adapted versions of his shorter works.
00:08:44I think there's a number of reasons why
00:08:51Dickens embraced his performative side of his written work
00:08:52partially to engage with his lifelong interest in
00:08:56performance in Theatre in performing on the stage,
00:08:59but partially because of the sense of engaging with a reading community as well.
00:09:04Coming face to face with an audience, Dickens,
00:09:08in reading his works allowed to a paying audience,
00:09:10allowed him to commune with that audience to build a sense of the leadership.
00:09:13It also allowed him, of course, to stab these works as particularly his as a critic.
00:09:17Ivan crowd camp has argued part of Dickens motivation in reading his
00:09:22work publicly was to put his particular stamp of ownership on it.
00:09:26Dickens in the earlier century in the 18 forties
00:09:30have been particularly vexed by the questions of copyright,
00:09:33of plagiarism, of people ripping off his work by reading his works in public.
00:09:36He could then say, These are mine. These texts belong to me.
00:09:41And likewise, of course, is the fact that these tours made a lot of money as well.
00:09:45In fact, this was a lucrative, uh, lucrative form of business for Dickens, uh,
00:09:49that he could perform these works to audiences across the country,
00:09:54but also in lucrative speaking tools of Ireland in America.
00:09:57And the reason why I'm telling you all this now is that it's a Christmas Carol,
00:10:02which starts it all off.
00:10:05His first public reading, was, in fact,
00:10:07the performance of A Christmas Carol in Birmingham Town
00:10:09Hall on the 27th of December 18 53.
00:10:12This was a charity reading,
00:10:15but it wasn't long before Dickens realised that he could
00:10:17actually make this into a far more lucrative side career.
00:10:19So he reads a Christmas Carol allowed throughout his
00:10:23career it's actually in his last performance as well,
00:10:25on the 15th of March 18 70 at a reading in London.
00:10:28So Christmas Carol then is very much bound up
00:10:32with the idea of Dickens as a literary celebrity,
00:10:35touring the country and touring the world.
00:10:38And I want us to bear in mind that a Christmas Carol is
00:10:41also meant to be read aloud not just by Dickens but by us.
00:10:43There was a poetry and Dickens prose that we often overlook,
00:10:48and I'll be exploring that in some of the
00:10:51close readings I'll be doing in this lecture series.
00:10:53
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Pittard, C. (2020, December 02). Dickens: A Christmas Carol - Dickens and Society [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/dickens-a-christmas-carol-pittard/dickens-and-society
MLA style
Pittard, C. "Dickens: A Christmas Carol – Dickens and Society." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 02 Dec 2020, https://massolit.io/courses/dickens-a-christmas-carol-pittard/dickens-and-society